Ana Carvajal and Jennifer Elliott of the IMF have a new paper out which takes international data from Iosco, the International Organization of Securities Commissions, and looks at how assiduous regulators are in about 80 different jurisdictions. They’re looking at enforcement, which comprises three Iosco principles:

I never find status-update posts (“I’ll be away from this blog for a while”) particularly helpful, so I tend not to indulge in them myself. But at least I have some non-negligible number of readers who return to the blog on a regular basis and might conceivably wonder what happened to me. If I was a blogger with the grand total of one blog entry since May, why would I put up a post saying I was back? Conversely, if I was a blogger who had posted just two blog entries since June, why would I put up a post saying I was going away?

In 2007, hot young artist Doug Aitken unveiled a massive public video-art project at MoMA. Sleepwalkers featured A-list celebrities, acres of publicity, and millions of dollars in production costs; its Flash site alone almost certainly cost many multiples of the total budget for Those About to Die Salute You, the utterly insane and hugely enjoyable public-art project put on by Duke Riley at the Queens Museum of Art last night in conjunction with the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio.

The New York Times needs all the revenue sources it can get right now, so it’s licensed its brand to the Global Wine Company and created the New York Times Wine Club. This is a good thing, and not only because it brings money into the NYT’s coffers: it’s also the first such wine club I’ve seen which works in a non-evil manner.